Irwin Klein And The New Settlers: Photographs Of Conterculture In New Mexico

Just in time for the 20th Anniversary of Hippy.com we are happy to announce the publication of a book about Hippie Culture from the 1960s in New Mexico.

One may ask why New Mexico? The author, Benjamin Klein, offers the answers in a book of photographs on hippies and the counterculture taken by his uncle Irwin Klein back in the day.

Irwin Klein and the New Settlers: Photographs of Conterculture in New Mexico was published in June, 2016. It was edited by Benjamin Klein who teaches European and world history at California State University.

Irwin Klein originally selected 80 photographs for publication, and wrote an introduction. Irwin Klein passed in 1974, and now his photo essay has been published for the first time in its entirety by the University of Nebraska Press.

The publisher notes: The work of Irwin Klein (1933–74) is archived in the permanent collections of the George Eastman House, the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Public Library, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives in Santa Fe.

“This is an evocative photo essay of the early counterculture in New Mexico. Excellent images that are enlightening.”—John Nichols, author of The Milagro Beanfield War and If Mountains Die: A New Mexico Memoir.

The book is available in hardcover for $29.95 from the University of Nebraska Press.

Jonah Raskin says about this book: If nothing else, Irwin Klein and the New Settlers shows that at the apex of the Sixties, hippies were everywhere and not just in San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury and New York’s Lower East Side.

The publisher states this is an "important contribution to the literature of the counterculture and especially the 1960s."

"Dropouts, renegades, utopians. Children of the urban middle class and old beatniks living alone, as couples, in families, or as groups in the small Nuevomexicano towns. When photographer Irwin Klein began visiting northern New Mexico in the mid-1960s, he found these self-proclaimed New Settlers—and many others—in the back country between Santa Fe and Taos. His black-and-white photographs captured the life of the counterculture’s transition to a social movement. His documentation of these counterculture communities has become well known and sought after for both its sheer beauty and as a primary source about a largely undocumented group."